Research Methods For Business Students

Welcome to the course "Research Methods for Business Students". Robert Barcik will provide you with some handy advice of how to proceed with the course materials in this introductory lecture.

Are you just starting with your research? Maybe this research is to get you a degree or it is a research for the company you are working at. In any case, the very first step is to understand what a research actually is. In this video we will define what a research is and what are the two main points from this definition.

The basic stratification of various researches is among basic and applied research. In this video, we will talk about the difference between these two. These two should be imagined on a bipolar line on which we are just trying to position ourselves. What is also important to say is that you should not try to have neither purely applied, nor purely basic research.

We need to choose one of three research natures. If we go for Exploratory, we will literally try to explore some new phenomena. With Descriptive nature, we will try to already describe what is going on with this phenomena. Finally with Explanatory nature, we are explaining why this phenomena exists.

Choosing proper research topic and great research idea is not easy. Luckily we can help ourselves with a few hints that will be discussed in this video. Firstly, we should strive for something that we are passionate about. Secondly, we might try to go for something that can be beneficial for our future career.

By now we have learned a good bit of a theory around writing a research paper so it's time to get some practice. At this point, we need to put down first lines of introduction and we need to write so-called Research Rationale. This is literally a justification of our research saying why is it worth to read our paper, or ultimately invest resources into it.

Students often forget that their research should be addressing some particular problem that is occurring outside in the world. If the research is not addressing any problem, then it's us who will have a problem :) Anyway, there needs to be a dedicated part in our research where we identify and justify every aspect of the problem that we are trying to solve.

The time has come when we need to come up with a research question and/or research objectives. Robert will give you some solid advice for this. As well, we need to go through various formats of how this part of our paper is written. the fact is, that we can have both - research questions and research objectives.

We have come to the end of Module 1, where we have learned the basics about writing a research paper. Robert will give you an advice, that you should make sure that you mastered the first module. The reason for that is, later modules and later work will be building on Module 1. So make sure that you got the most out of this Module.

Literature review is certainly going to be part of your research paper. The point here is to gather the information from the work of others in the field. Your research simply cannot start on empty meadow, you have to build on what has already been researched. Well, literature review is going to take this role.

What sources of information should we use, while we are conducting literature review? Can it be random webpages or does it have to be academic articles? Well, it can be both but it is important that our sources will be reliable and valid. In this video, we will focus on distinguishing between various information sources.

Enough of theories! Let's get some actual words and lines down. Robert will go through every detail of when it comes to writing. We will start of by searching for academic articles, continue with some tips while reading them and we will end it up with proper referencing. This video is made the way that you can watch his screen while he writes!

We are starting our journey of methodological choices. There is going to be a lot of them, but luckily for us, there is a tool that will help us called Research Onion. This Onion is exactly defining what choices we will have to make. We will explore this tool in this video and as well set a layout for the rest of the videos in this module.

As a researcher, we might adopt one of three research approaches. With Deductive, we will take some theories and test these with our collected data. The exact opposite is Inductive Approach, where we go from data to the creation of some new theories. Finally we have Abductive Approach, which is a little more tricky.

Our choice between Quantitative and Qualitative Research Design will have consequences for the rest of our research, so we have to choose wisely. With Quantitative Approach, we will lean toward "numbers", while with Qualitative Approach towards "words", sentences and generally some text. But be careful, there is more than this one difference.

Research strategy is a plan of how you aim to achieve your research goal. The definition is a bit broader so we will talk through it. There are many options available for us, so in this video we will outline ourselves all of them and discuss how our previous methodological choices have to work with our choice of research strategy.

Experiment is the first research strategy that we need to discuss. This strategy is mostly used for social studies such as organisational behaviour on the workplace. We need to be clear about our dependent, independent, moderating as well as mediating variables if we want to execute experiment properly.

Survey is a research strategy that is very often used among business administration and marketing students. It will allow us to collect large amount of standardized data for instance through questionnaires. In this video we will talk just through the very basics of this research strategy.

Case study is a research strategy that can give us amazing insights into any business phenomena! Our cases can be people or even organizations. There are several ways how a case study can be performed, so we will discuss these stratifications in this video. Finally, we need to connect our choice of Case Study with previous methodological choices.

Action Research is a very specific research strategy. In essence, this strategy is very practical, interactive and especially iterative! Your task as a researcher will be to come to a an organization and by interacting with its members, generate some practical knowledge that will be useful for both - the organization itself and a researcher.

Did you know that even listening to the stories of people is an actual research strategy? Person telling a stories is in this case called narrator and researcher by listening to such person is able to discover these minor nuances in between the lines. This is a very interesting research strategy for us, if we intend to research some event that occurred in the past.

Did you know that our research should acknowledge time perspective? If we are researching a current state of some phenomena, we are essentially doing a "snapchat" of that state. In this case we are going for a cross-sectional study. The other option is longitudinal study, when we are observing a change in phenomena that is occurring over some period of time.

Two criteria that our research has to fulfill are that it has to be reliable and valid. Reliability is about whether if someone else performed a similar research, if the two results would be alike. Hence we really need to measure what we claim to measure. Validity on the other hand is a measurement of whether our methodological choices were correct.

Another issue that we need to think of while conducting a research, is the actual role of ourselves. Do we intend to get involved in the phenomena that we are researching? If yes, then to what extent? We can undertake a role of External Researcher while not getting involved. Ultimately we can undertake a role of Internal Researcher so that we can get deeper insights into the phenomena.

It might happen that the population you are researching is very small and you are able to cover it whole, that is called census. However, in most of the cases population is too large for this. In that scenario, we have to select a sample that will be used for our research. So what is this sample and how do we select it?

If we intend to use Probability Sampling Techniques, we need to be able to calculate the probability for each case being selected. If we succeed, we can use techniques such as Simple Random Sampling, Stratified Random Sampling or Cluster Sampling to obtain a truly random sample that will be included in our research!

Non-probability sampling techniques come in handy for most of the business reasearchers, as for their purpose, it is not possible to calculate size of the reseach population - hence they are unable to use probability sampling techniques. These non-probability practice involves techniques such as Purposive, Quota, Volunteer or Haphazard Sampling.

Once we are collecting a data for our research, we can really on two streams - primary and secondary data. What are the pros and cons of both?

Observation is a very useful data collection method. It allows us to observe the behaviour of people in various situations and under various circumstances.

Interviews are a great option for a primary data collection. We have to be careful as some biases may occur. As well there are several types of interviews.

It is tricky to construct a good Questionnaire. We need to select proper variables, question formats and finally overall wording. So let's learn how to do it.